


Like Moths to Candlelight

by Ivy_in_the_Garden



Category: Cain Saga and Godchild, Crimson Peak - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Don’t have to be familiar with Godchild to read, F/M, Implied Violence, Implied rape in backstory, Incest, My first crossover, Revenge, gothic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 22:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16900881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ivy_in_the_Garden/pseuds/Ivy_in_the_Garden
Summary: When pushed to find their next victim, Lucille and Thomas turn their sights on newly eligible bachelor Alexis Hargreaves.





	Like Moths to Candlelight

It is Lucille’s turn. 

The suspicious deaths of sad, but wealthy women is, unfortunately, a familiar pattern for Scotland Yard, and the Sharpe siblings have no intention of being caught by a glaring flaw in their plan that any child would have noticed. It is time to… mix it up a little. And so, Lucille brings out her finery, by now as thin as a moth’s wing, for one of the many parties one could find around Cornwall, with a little persistence, a little flattery, and a little mail theft.  The target—the widowed Earl Alexis Hargreaves. Heir to a not-insignificant fortune and an not-insignificant past. With his wife dead almost seven years,  Earl Hargreaves would surely be searching for a new mother for his boy. Cain.

(What a dreadful name for a boy. She can’t remember what she would have called the feeble infant that died in—no. She doesn’t want to remember.)

Lucille grimaces a little.

Motherhood is not a role she particularly longed to return to, she thinks as the strands of her hair runs through her hands like rain, as she plaits her long, black hair in front of the chipped mirror precariously balanced on the wash stand. She watches herself, slowly, appraisingly, before tucking the ends under the braid, smoothing the fly-aways, pinching color into her cheeks like a schoolgirl.

“You’re so much better at this than I am,” she murmurs to Thomas, leaning on him in the near-darkness.

A wry smile is her only answer.

* * *

He’s there, all cultivated charm. Earl Hargreaves. Chatting it up with two women, neither of whom Lucille recognizes. But when his gaze falls upon her, a ghost twenty years out of fashion in her brushed satin dress, his words still and his hand tightens on the stem of his champagne class.

Lucille seizes the opportunity. “Earl Hargreaves,” she says, offering the hand without the family ring. (She can’t bear that the filthy lips of an outsider might touch it.)

This breaks the spell, and charm returns to Alexis. “Lady Sharpe,” he returns, only a slight pause indicating his puzzlement as to her identity. His slight question stings her: she’s spent the last decade trying to keep the house together, not spend it away at parties no one remembers.  

“Indeed,” she whispers, as he kisses her hand, and tries not to pull away.

“Forgive me,” he replies smoothly, “but for a moment there, you reminded me of my sister.”

“Your sister?” Lucille resists the urge to raise an eyebrow. If this is a pick-up line, it is a poor one.

Afterwards, when the glamour has quite worn off, she and Thomas pick through the guide to British nobility, finding only her name: Augusta Hargreaves, widowed with a daughter.  The calls she makes are more evasive. Yes, yes, Alexis had a sister; no death dates. Lucille can put two and two together: she couldn’t have survived all these years without her wit–Augusta has been either disowned, or locked up.

Her hands curl into fists.  

* * *

They marry in the dampness of June, and he tries to poison her not even a fortnight afterwards. Alexis is an amateur, through and through. If he thinks she cannot recognize arsenic on sight alone, by the flecks in her tea, then he must think her a fool. So, she plays along. She whitens her face with powder, clasps a hand to her forehead, feigns the weakness he sees as a comfort. She pleads with him, as his newest wife, to stay at a fashionable hotel, where she can be seen by society and not locked away in a melancholy castle.

He agrees with that indulgent smile on his lips. The damp is no good for _his little wife._

The morning after they check in, Lucille complains of a vicious headache to her maid, anything to give her some space. When the weight in the bed shifts and Alexis creeps downstairs to wash, she waits a few minutes before dressing. She’s always preferred trousers to dresses; more movement, less noise. And no one ever suspects a woman.

She stops halfway on the stairs, as a half-confession precedes her. Obsession for his sister, a maddening, torrid obsession for a woman his affections terrorized into madness; the woman who bore a son, his child, Cain—! Lucile finds her resolution in the memory of the pale woman all alone in her room, her hair gone white from stress.

“Is that the latest Parisian fashion,” he quips, setting down the razor, when she makes herself known. In response, Lucille only smiles and adjusts her thick leather gloves.

And Alexis discovers that a sink is not only for washing.

**Author's Note:**

> As one friend wrote, R.I.P. sink. XD
> 
> Thank you for reading this indulgent crossover. Comments are loved.


End file.
